June Book Club: “House of Prayer No. 2”

We’re excited to announce that our book club will be reading Mark Richard’s memoir, “House of Prayer No. 2,” in June. We were captivated by the book, which is quite unusual. It moves between tenses and voices, times and places, nightmares and dreams with improbable ease. It charts a journey from a difficult and disturbing childhood (Richard, who grew up in Virginia, was a “special child,” which, he writes, “in the South means one between Down’s and dyslexic”) to a successful writing career (he won the PEN/Hemingway award for his first fiction collection in 1989, and the following year published a story in The New Yorker); it also charts the author’s spiritual awakening.

Normally, we’d stick to fiction for summer, but this is the only season in which to read “House of Prayer No. 2.” The book is filled with the heat of a long-lost American South, one with stronger ties to the era of the Civil War than to our own. Here’s a paragraph taken from the opening chapter (which moves—so strangely!—between the second-person imperative and the third-person present):

Move the family to a tobacco county in Southside Virginia. It is the early sixties, and black families still get around on mule and wagon. Corn grows up to the backs of houses even in town. Crosses burn in yards of black families and Catholics. Crew cut the special child’s hair in the barbershop where all the talk is of niggers and nigger-lovers. Give the child the responsibility of another playmate, the neighbor two houses down, Dr. Jim. When Dr. Jim was the child’s age, Lee left his army at Appomattox. When Dr. Jim falls down between the corn rows he is always hoeing, the child must run for help. Sometimes the child just squats beside Dr. Jim sprawled in the corn and listens to Dr. Jim talking to the sun. Sometimes in the orange and grey dust when the world is empty, the child lies in the cold backyard grass and watches the thousand starlings swarm Dr. Jim’s chimneys, and the child feels like he is dying in an empty world.

We get chills every time we read this passage. We hope it grabs you as it did us, and that you’ll join us this month in reading and discussing Richard’s book. The conversation kicks off this week.

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